WWW.EXOPOLITICS.COM

June 2006

Aloha all, I want to alert you to the Jerry Pippin Show's fine coverage of the ET Civilizations and World Peace conference. A number of interviews are available online and video excerpts of several presentations are also available, along with reports by Paola Harris who covered the conference for Jerry. There are also links to conference reports and the Hawaii Declaration. The URL for Jerry's conference webpage is:http://www.jerrypippin.com/Hawaii%20ETCWP%20Conference.htm.

Furthermore, the Hawaii Declaration has so far been translated from the English original into French, German and Italian. The translated versions are available from the conference webpage http://www.etworldpeace.com and link directly to Paola Harris's website where the translations were first made available. I thank Paola for making the translated versions available and promoting the Declaration internationally.

I thank Jerry, Paola and Larry Dickens for their very professional work in covering the conference and urge you all to support Jerry's continued efforts in promoting UFO/extraterrestrial disclosure, and supporting those of us in the field organizing conferences or doing field investigations. You can learn more about the Jerry Pippin Show at: http://www.jerrypippin.comand Paola Harris at: http://www.paolaharris.it/

Complete Videos of the presentations of all conference speakers can be purchased fromwww.etworldpeace.com

QUOTE FROM PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN (1987 United Nations ADDRESS):

"What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?... My message today is that the dreams of ordinary people reach to astonishing heights. If we diplomatic pilgrims are to achieve equal altitudes, we must build all we do on the full breadth of humanity's will and consent and the full expanse of the human heart. Thank you, and God bless you all." Read full 1987 U.N. Address by President Reagan: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/092187b.htm

"I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

"Non-Terrestrial Officers?" I say.

"Yeah, I looked it up," says Gary, "and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.

"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."

"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?"

"I guess so," says Gary.

"What were the ship names?"

"I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."

Note - This is - possibly - a profoundly important development. If Mr. McKinnon's data and assumption are correct, it validates what I and others have been postulating for many years: that the US Navy/Military may well be operating off-planet via back-engineered ET technology (or WWII German?) for a long time...long enough to have a 'fleet' of space craft and officers to either man them or otherwise control them. For those who remember the Clementine mission, you will recall it was a US Navy project which micro-mapped the entire Moon. If McKinnon stumbled onto a secret file of 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'...it would, indeed, suggest the US Military has been quietly, efficiently, secretly running off-planet operations for a longtime. - JR

Sploid.com6-15-6

Gary McKinnon, the English hacker facing 70 years in U.S. prison for searching Pentagon sites for UFO evidence, says the weirdest thing he foundwas a list of "Non-Terrestrial Officers" and fleet transfers between ships that don't exist in the U.S. Navy.

'I found a list of officers' names,' he claims, 'under the heading Non-Terrestrial Officers.'

'Non-Terrestrial Officers?'

'Yeah, I looked it up,' says Gary, 'and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of fleet-to-fleet transfers, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't U.S. navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet.'

http://www.sploid.com/news/2005/07/hacker_uncovere.php

THE GUARDIAN

Game over

Gary McKinnon has been accused of committing the 'biggest military computer hack of all time', and if extradited to the US faces up to 70 years in jail. So how did this techno geek from north London end up cracking open the Pentagon and Nasa's systems? He talks exclusively to Jon Ronson as he awaits his fate

Saturday July 9, 2005The Guardian

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday July 23 2005

In the following article we incorrectly referred to a piece of software called RemotelyAnywhere as a hacking programme. The programme, made by 3am Labs, is designed for remote access and administration. It is used by thousands of enterprises worldwide. We apologise for the unintended misrepresentation.

In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the movie WarGames at his local cinema in Crouch End, north London. In WarGames, a geeky computer whiz kid hacks into a secret Pentagon network and, inadvertently, almost instigates world war three. Sitting in the cinema that day, the teenage Gary wondered if he, too, could be a hacker.

Article continues"Really," I say to him now, "WarGames should have put you off hacking for life."

"Well," he replies, "I didn't mean it to actually come true." WarGames ends with the Pentagon telling the young nerd how impressed they are by his technical acumen. He's probably going to grow up to have a brilliant career at Nasa or the department of defence. This is an unlikely scenario for Gary McKinnon. He currently faces 20 charges in the US, including stealing computer files, obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy", intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, and interfering with maritime navigation equipment in New Jersey. Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow Street magistrates court - he had, the American prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military computer hack of all time". He "caused damage and impaired the integrity of information ... The US military district of Washington became inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown was $700,000 ... These [hacking attacks] occurred immediately after 9/11 ... " And so on.

This is Gary's first interview. He called me out of the blue on the Monday before last, just as I was screaming at my child to stop knocking on people's doors and running away. "Your son sounds like a hacker," he told me. Then he invited me to his house in Bounds Green, north London. He is good-looking, funny, slightly camp, nerdy, chain-smokes Benson & Hedges, and is terrified. "I'm walking down the road and I find I can't control my own legs," he says. "And I'm sitting up all night thinking about jail and about being arse-fucked. An American jail. And remember, according to them I was making Washington inoperable 'immediately after September 11'. I'm having all these visions of ... " Gary puts on a redneck prisoner voice, "'What you doing attacking our country, boy? Pick up that soap.' Yeah, it is absolutely fucking terrifying. Especially because a friend of mine was on holiday in America once and was viciously attacked and ended up killing the guy who attacked him - he did 10 years in an American prison. He's quite a tough guy, and he said he had to fight tooth and nail every single day, no let up at all. And I'm thinking, 'I'm only a little nerd'."

The prison sentence the US justice department is seeking - should Gary be successfully extradited - is up to 70 years. What Gary was hunting for, as he snooped around Nasa, and the Pentagon's network, was evidence of a UFO cover-up.

Gary McKinnon was born in Glasgow in 1966. His father ran a scaffolding gang, but his parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," Gary says, "and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started reading science fiction, too, and doing everything he did."

Gary read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein - "the golden age of science fiction" - and he joined Bufora, the British UFO Research Association, when he was 15. Bufora describes itself as "a nationwide network of around 300 people, who have a dedicated, noncultist interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma".

"So you began to believe in UFOs," I say.

"To hope," says Gary, "that there might be something more advanced than us, keeping a friendly eye on us. Hopefully a friendly eye." Then he saw WarGames, and he thought, "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it a try.

He sat in his girlfriend Tamsin's aunt's house in Crouch End, and he began to hack. He downloaded a program that searched for computers that used the Windows operating system, scanned addresses and pinpointed administrator user names that had no passwords. Basically, what Gary was looking for - and found time and again - were network administrators within high levels of the US government and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords. That's how he got in.

His Bufora friends "were living in cloud cuckoo land", he says. "All those conspiracy theorists seemed more concerned with believing it than proving it." He wanted evidence. He did a few trial runs, successfully hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be".

"Like where?" I ask.

"The US Space Command," he says.

And so, for the next seven years, on and off, Gary sat in his girlfriend's aunt's house, a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's next to the mouse pad, and he snooped. From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason. On those occasions, Gary's connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary.

He sounds to me like a virtuoso hacker, although I am someone who can barely download RealPlayer. I nod blankly as he says things like, "You get on to easy networks, like Support and Logistics, in order to exploit the trust relationship that military departments have between each other, and once you get on to an easy thing, you find out what networks they trust and then you hop and hop and hop, and eventually you think, 'That looks a bit more secretive.' " When I ask if he is brilliant, he says no. He's just an ordinary self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone.

"Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand ..."

"All on at once?" I ask. "You could see hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military realising?"

"Every night," he says, "for the entire five to seven years I was doing this."

"Do you think they're still there? Are they still at it? Or have they been arrested, too?"

Gary says he doesn't know.

"What was the most exciting thing you saw?" I ask.

"I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

"Non-Terrestrial Officers?" I say.

"Yeah, I looked it up," says Gary, "and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.

"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."

"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?"

"I guess so," says Gary.

"What were the ship names?"

"I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."

This was November 2000. By now, Gary was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, "which hugely pissed off my girlfriend Tamsin. It was the last straw. She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill because I didn't have a job. We were still living together. God, have you ever tried living with someone after you've split up? It's bad."

So while Tamsin was trying to get on with her new relationship, Gary was in the living room of her aunt's house, hacking. He snooped around all the Forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, etc - reading internal court martial reports of soldiers getting imprisoned for rape and murder and drug abuse. At the Johnson Space Centre he spied on photographs of cigar-shaped objects that might have been UFOs but - he says - were probably satellites. "You end up lusting after more and more complex security measures," he says. "It was like a game. I loved computer games. I still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive. Hugely addictive."

It was never really politically motivated. The most political he's ever got is to attend a Noam Chomsky lecture. A John Pilger book sits on the coffee table next to his bed. Yes, he was hacking in the immediate aftermath of September 11, but only because he wanted to see if there was a conspiracy afoot. "Why did the building fall like a controlled series of explosions? " he says. "I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for myself."

"And did you find a conspiracy?" I ask.

"No," he says.

He strenuously denies the justice department's charge that he caused the "US military district of Washington" to become "inoperable". Well, once, he admits, but only once, he inadvertently pressed the wrong button and may have deleted some government files.

"What did you do then?"

"I thought, 'Ooh, bloody hell,' " he says. "And that's when I stopped for a while. And then my friend told me about Darpa. And so I started again."

Darpa is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, an intriguing collection of brilliant military scientists, funded by the Pentagon. Darpa has been widely credited with inventing, among other things, the internet, the global positioning system, the computer mouse, and - somewhat more boneheadedly - FutureMAP, an online futures market designed to predict assassinations and bombings by encouraging investor speculation in such crimes. The US Senate once described FutureMAP as "an unbelievably stupid idea". Darpa has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists because it is semi-secretive, bizarre (they have put much effort into creating a team of telepathic spies) and occupies that murky world that lies between science and war.

Gary heard from a friend that Darpa might have invented a robot soldier, so he hacked in and claims he found evidence of "an autonomous machine that would go in and do the dirty work. These things could go upstairs and look for bombs. You wouldn't have to send in real people. And I also found these awful special forces training videos of guys running around, doing close-quarter battle. It was ridiculous. These yellow words would flash on to the video: 'BRUTALITY! REMEMBER BRUTALITY! SHOCK! DOMINATION!' You're thinking, 'Oh my God!' It was like Batman." I tell Gary that I've seen videos like that - incredibly fierce special forces training videos - when I was researching my book about US psychological operations.

"It's as if investigative journalism has died," he replies. "That's all I was doing. The only difference between you and me was that you were invited."

Gary was caught in November 2002. He says it was inevitable, in retrospect, because he was "getting a bit sloppy". He pauses. "I'd never have envisaged this happening to myself, but I did get a bit megalomaniacal as well. It got a bit silly. I ended up talking to people I hacked into."

"Saying 'I'm a hacker'?"

"No," he says, "I'd instant message them, using WordPad, with a bit of a political diatribe. You know, I'd leave a message on their desktop that read 'Secret government is blah blah blah.' " They found Gary in the end because he'd used his own email address to download a hacking program called RemotelyAnywhere. "God knows why I used my real email address," he says. "I suppose it means I'm not a secretive, sophisticated, checking-myself-every-step-of-the-way type of hacker."

On the night before his arrest, Gary had been up playing games. "Maybe I'd been doing a bit of weak, fun hacking, too," he says. "I'd had one hour's sleep, and I woke up completely muddled, and suddenly at the bottom of my bed there was this voice: 'Hello, my name's Jeff Donson from the National High Tech Crime Unit. Gary McKinnon, you're under arrest!' They put Tamsin and me in the meat-wagon. They took my PC, Tamsin's PC, three other computers I was fixing for friends. They went upstairs and took my girlfriend's auntie's daughter's computer."

Gary was kept in a police station overnight. Then the Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the whole sentence.' I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and when I said no, she was very, 'Ooh, they're going to come down heavy.' "

In return, Gary offered a somewhat hare-brained counter deal, via a Virginia public defender. "I made a sort of veiled threat to them. I said, 'You know the places I've been, so you know the stuff I've seen' kind of thing." He pauses and blushes slightly. "That didn't work."

"So you were saying, 'If you go heavy on me, I'll tell people what I found'?"

"Yeah," he says. "And I found out that my landline was being bugged, so every time I was on the phone talking to a friend about it, I made sure I'd say, 'All I want is a quiet life, but if they really want to drag me through it, I'll drag them through the shit, too.' "

"And what would you have dragged them through the shit about?" I ask.

"You know," says Gary, "the, uh, Non-Terrestrial Officers. The spaceships. 'The whole world thinks it's cooperating in building the International Space Station, but you've already got a space-based army that you refer to as Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

There is a silence.

"I had very little evidence," he admits. "It's not a very good bargaining chip at all, really, is it?"

Given that the justice department has announced that the information Gary downloaded was not "classified", and he was stoned much of the time, perhaps we can assume that Nasa is not too worried about his "discoveries".

I ask Gary what's he's going to do next. He says on Friday he's off to the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, for the London 2600 meeting. He explains that they're known as a hacking group, but really they're a bunch of "unqualified experts who drink lots of beer and tell you all the funky undocumented things you can do with your mobile phones. They wire up PlayStation 2s and X-Boxes to dance mats. They play with technology and bend stuff without breaking it."

I ask Gary if they see him as some kind of mythical hero, now that the US government has described him as the biggest military hacker of all time. He says, no, they see him as a complete idiot. And, in some ways, he is indeed a complete idiot. Well, he is a likable and intelligent geeky man who did many, many idiotic things. What he is not, his friends and supporters reckon, is someone who deserves extradition and 70 years in an American jail. They've set up a Free Gary McKinnon website (spy.org.uk/freegary).

Gary's never spoken publicly before, but now, with the extradition proceedings, he says there's nothing left open to him. For a while, it crossed his mind he might end up like the computer nerd from WarGames, having a brilliant career working for them. "They need people like me," he says. But that's not going to happen.

He's also chosen to talk now because his chances of getting a job have diminished to practically zero. "For the first time in the past few years, I just had a solid work offer," he says. "Game-testing. Which would have been a dream for me. I'm still a big kid like that. I'd love to do that for a job. But now, as a condition of this bail, I'm not allowed to touch the internet. So that was out of the window. So. Yeah. I thought, fuck it."

He and Tamsin have split up. He no longer lives in Crouch End but in the nearby, slightly more down-at-heel Bounds Green, and has given up smoking dope. He is not allowed near the internet, not allowed a passport, and spends a lot of time reading and sitting in the pub, awaiting his fate.

Nothing much happened in the years since his arrest in 2002 under the Computer Misuse Act - no charges were brought against him in the UK. Then on June 8 this year, he suddenly found himself in front of Bow Street magistrates, the target of extradition proceedings. That's when the panic attacks kicked in again, the horror visions of life in an American jail. He had poked around, he says, but he hadn't broken anything, besides that one inadvertent mistake. He thought he was going to get a year, max. Now they're talking about 70 years.

"You know," he says as we finish the interview, "everyone thinks this is fun or exciting. But it isn't exciting to me. It is terrifying."

It seems difficult in these heady times of action to seek beyond evil to its roots, much less to the sources of the very idea of evil in the way that human beings seem programmed to think. But seek we must; otherwise a world we have trouble understanding may, finally, crash around us with all of the shock, disruption, and loss of life that we experienced in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

The words of wise leaders have cautioned us about the need for a fundamental shift in thinking and perception. Former Czech President Vaçlav Havel and Albert Einstein are two such figures. Havel, in his February 1990 address to the United States Congress, spoke of the antiquated straitjacket of the bipolar view of the world, and stressed that without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans.  Einstein warned repeatedly that without a fundamental change in human thinking, our species would drift toward ultimate catastrophe.

The search for the understanding, knowledge, and insight that such wisdom demands may seem soft in a time of radical patriotism, polarization, and simplification. ut it may be that only a profound shift in how we perceive the worldin consciousness itselfcan, in the end, create a secure and just civilization in which opportunity is available for all, and no one is left out.

October 21, 2001, on the radio program Me and Mario, former New York governor Mario Cuomo said, This may get me into trouble [indicating his awareness of how unpopular any effort to understand seemed to be in the jingoistic climate of that moment], but the only way to solve the terrorist problem is to change the minds of those who practice terrorism. Cuomo is on the right track, I think, but it is not likely that the minds of the terrorists themselves will change, nor is it only terrorists whose thinking is problematic. The need to change minds must apply to all of us who would prefer to avoid trying to face the fact that terrorism does not arise in a vacuum, nor from some inchoate reservoir of evil out of which particular bad people may spontaneously emerge at certain times in history.

The proper place to begin our effort to understand (not excuse), it seems to me, is with the question of causation. For no matter how loathsome we may find the acts of fanatics, without understanding what breeds them and drives them to do what they do in a particular time and place, we have little chance of preventing further such actions, let alone of eradicating terrorism. 

We can think of three levels of causation, each calling for solutions or responses appropriate to its own level. These might be called 1) Immediate causesin this case, the purposive actions of men or women who are willing to die as they destroy other lives in the process; 2) Proximate causesthe human pain and socioeconomic breeding ground of such desperate behavior; and 3) Deeper causes deriving from the nature of mind, of consciousness itself.Immediate Causes

At the most immediate level, the cause of the recent events is obviously the actions of people governed by implacable hatred, who are willing to sacrifice their own lives in the process of killing others without regard for those they destroy. The natural, perhaps inevitable, response to such actions is to find out who did it, stop others like them, and punish their supporters. This involves gathering intelligence, and a military campaign. Military action may produce real successes, but focusing exclusively on this level of the problem, while ignoring or giving too little attention to the deeper levels, may result mainly in provoking still greater antagonism that spawns more terrorism, and, in the long run, bringing about a widening war without doing anything about what gave rise to the hatred and aggression in the first place.

Proximate Causes

Listening to the pronouncements of President Bush and other American leaders in the weeks after the events of 9-11, one could get the impression that the rage that leads to the planning and execution of terrorist acts arises from a kind of void, unconnected with history, without causation other than pure evil fueled by jealousy. Yet it is not difficult to discover that the present conflict has complex historical and economic roots. It has grown out of the affliction of countless millions of people in the Middle East and elsewhere who perceive themselves to have been victims of the policies of a superpower and its allies that have little concern for their lives, needs, or suffering; and to the actions of multinational corporations that, in the words of Indian writer Arundhati Roy, are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.  For these millions, a figure such as Osama bin Laden, whom we see only as a mass murderer, can become a hero because he moved beyond helplessness to action against the seemingly indifferent and invincible oppressor.

It is inconceivable that terrorism can be checked, much less eradicated, if these causes are not addressed. This would require, at the very least, a re-examination of government policies that one-sidedly favor Israel in relation to the Palestinians (not to mention our support of Saddam Hussein against Iran before he set off a conflict a few years later). It would require further help with the growing refugee problem, and a turning of our attention to the toll that poverty and disease are taking in the Middle East and other parts of the globe. These may not be the conditions under which the terrorist leaders themselves have lived, but they create the reservoir of misery, hurt, helplessness, and rage from which the foot soldiers of terrorism can be recruited.

The role of the United States in creating these conditions can be debated, but as a superpower that consumes a major portion of the Earths resources, there can be little doubt that not only are we seen in many parts of the world as responsible for them, but we are looked to, along with other privileged Western nations, to do much more to help in their solution.

Certainly there is much more that could and has been said about the causes of terrorism that I am calling proximate, but the principal focus of this article is different. I am concerned here with what might be thought of as more fundamental causes, the roots of terrorism that derive from mind, from consciousness itself, and from the institutions that express its purposes and intentions.

Deeper Causes

Worldviews. Political psychology, or the application of psychological understanding to political phenomena, should begin with a consideration of worldviews. A worldview is an organizing principle or philosophy, a fixed way of thinking or habit of mind. Worldviews are similar to ideologies but broader in scope. (Ideologies derive from worldviews, but are more specific, usually having to do with particular social, political, and economic systems. ) A worldview might be thought of as a kind of mental template into which we try to fit events. Without some sort of worldview, which can also be thought of as a lens through which to see the world, we would feel even more helpless, unable to orient ourselves in a world that has become increasingly complex and unsettling. Worldviews tend to be rather rigidly structured, and are able to withstand a huge amount of information that is difficult, if not impossible, to fit into them. When faced with data that might appear to challenge a worldview, or reveal it to be dysfunctional, most of us, most of the time, will construe a situation, or reconstrue the facts, rather than modify the worldview.

"When faced with data that challenge a worldview most of us will construe a situation, or reconstrue the facts, rather than modify the worldview"

Dualistic Thinking. In relation to the events of 9-11, and to the terrorist threat they represent, we have a chance to observe two largely contradictory worldviews. One might be thought of as the dualistic, dichotomizing, or polarizing habit of mind. The dualistic mind divides the world into conflicting polarities good and evil, God and the Devil, for or against, friend or enemy, deserving or undeserving. (This is particularly important in providing the assumptive underpinning for perpetuating racial and socioeconomic differences). The dualistic mind fragments, seeing separation and difference more easily than unity and connection. The polarizing mind is not incapable of love, but such love is restricted in its application to one side, leaving the lover free to hate a designated enemy.

A second worldview holds tightly to the ideal of universal love and oneness. This worldview has its own rigidities, and can be inappropriate when applied uncritically to a situation that defies its precepts.

"At this turning point in history, probably nothing less than a radical reorientation of mind can offer any hope for the future of human life on this planet"

But I will focus here on the first, for it is expressions dualistic thinking in the form of blindness to diversity, obliviousness of the effects of inequalities of resources, and a lack of concern for the vast suffering that prevails on this planet that have given rise to the present dangerous crisis. The polarizing mind will always be with us because it is the mind history. If anyone ever questioned this, the present crisis should put such doubts to rest. On each side the faithful have been rallied by religious slogans and exhorted to destroy the evil enemy. The language of crusading and of religious warfare is all about us.

There have been efforts recently to let religion off the hook.  Jesus, it is said, preached of love, and Islam opposes the killing of innocents, but it is not that simple. For, as former Paulist priest James Carroll has written, dualistic language is readily found in religious texts. Messages of universal love and peace coexist in the Bible and in the Koran with contrasting statements. Our noblest impulses, he writes, come inevitably intertwined with opposite inclinations.  Messages of universal love or of division and exclusion, of lasting peace or of holy war, can all be found in the Bible and the Koran: It is a matter of selection and interpretation. Religion and religious institutions can serve to polarize and stimulate violence, or to unite and transcend it. Religious leaders bear a huge responsibility in the present crisis, and can play a critical role in moving beyond it.

Public Discourse. At this turning point in history, probably nothing less than a radical reorientation of mind and an authentic mastery of the psychology of violence can offer any hope for the future of human life on this planet. The accumulated hurts are so deep, the consequent rage so intense, the ignorance of their roots so prevailing, and the technological means of destruction so sophisticated and so readily available, that, as President Bush stated in his December 11, 2001 address to the Citadel (a military academy in South Carolina), a relatively few determined killers can now plan and execute projects of annihilation that can end life as we know it. There is no guarantee that a profound psychospiritual sea change, a transformation of mind and heart, can prevent this, at least in time. But I cannot see how anything short of this offers the possibility of survival for our species.

The transformation I write of here must, of course, start with attention to what I have referred to above as proximate causes. These include the unconscionable inequalities in the distribution of resources, the unmet material needs of much of the worlds population, and the strongs continuing political oppression of the weak, who will inevitably turn into terrorists and dictators in desperation, if not for justice and relief, at least for an outlet for their rage and frustration.

My focus, for purposes of this article, is different. The quest for understanding that can lead us out of our present catastrophic morass begins with the recognition that knowledge of the ways of the mind in the arenas of political conflict is relevant and useful. Political psychology is a relatively new field, but one to which not only academic psychologists and social scientists are being increasingly drawn, but also diplomats and other political professionals.

The dualistic mind is not by nature self-reflective and, inasmuch as it attributes good to its own motives and actions, it will find the opposite of good in the other. Negative or aggressive ideas and feelings that are not consistent with this positive self-regard must be pushed away, or projected outwards and attributed to the enemy. A vulnerable and frightened public can all too easily be enrolled into this dangerous way of thinking. Psychologists, social scientists, spiritual leaders, and political professionals (as well as government and other institutional leaders who understand this basic truth), have a responsibility to do whatever they can in their speaking and writing to change the public conversation so that the role of ones own group in the creation of political conflict can be acknowledged and examined, and new possibilities brought forth to create a genuine global community.Transcending The Dualistic Mind

Once we begin to look at the private aggressor or terrorist in ourselves, and, as a nation, begin to look publicly at our own contribution to creating the hostility of which we find ourselves the target, other kinds of knowing become possible. Then we can begin to look at how the mind deals with differences, and is prone to the creation of enemies, especially when our very existence appears to be threatened. Then we can begin to look beyond mere tolerance to true knowing of the other. Only the mind that has recognized and integrated or transcended its primitive dualistic habits can begin to identify with the suffering and rage of geographically distant peoples. Only then can we see the aggression and ignorance that underlies our dominance and neglect, and perceive our own role in the creation of victims far from our own shores.Emerging Possibilities And Opportunities

Even as we face unprecedented peril from the forces that divide us, there is emerging in science, religion, psychology, and technology possibilities that may bring us back from the edge of destruction. Certainly the internet and other information systems offer the possibility of worldwide interconnection, although these have yet to realize their potential for transcending duality and enmity. But, more fundamentally, we are now witnessing a coming together of science, psychology, and spirituality after centuries of ideological and disciplinary fragmentation. Both modern physics and depth psychology are revealing to us a universe in which mind and matter appear intimately related. The very notion of separation seems to be a kind of illusion, and all that we can perceive around us is connected by resonances, both physical and nonphysical, that can make the possibility of universal justice, truth, and love more than just a utopian fantasy.

At the heart of this possibility lie what in the Western secular world are called non-ordinary states of consciousness, but in the worlds great religious traditions is variously called primary religious feeling, mystical oneness, connection with the ground of being, or universal love. For a person in this state of consciousness, neglect of the needs of others, the toleration of great suffering, the killing of innocents (collateral damage), the making of war itself, or the desecration of the Earths environment is virtually unthinkable. At the heart of these states of consciousness or being is a potential extension of the self beyond its usual boundaries. Thus these states make possible the identification with other beings or objects, wherever they are located, and with the Earth itself.

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls this quality of conscious interconnectedness interbeing.  It is what Frederic Brussat and Mary Ann Brussat had in mind when, after the events of September 11, they adapted his poem Please Call Me by My True Namesto read, I am a loyal American who feels violated, and vows to stand behind any military action it takes to wipe terrorists off the face of the Earth, and I am a boy in a faraway country rejoicing in the streets of my village because someone has hurt the hated Americans, and I am a doctor in a hospital treating patients burned from head to toe who knows that these horrible images will remain in my mind forever, and I am a stone in the graveyard of Trinity Church covered with soot from the buildings that once stood proudly above me, death meeting death.  The sequence is long, taking in all beings, including the terrorists themselves.Toward A Consciousness Of Interconnection

It is no longer just Buddhist monks or other holy people and religious leaders who are undertaking the practices that create a consciousness of interconnection. A great shift in consciousness is taking place, even as the threat of annihilation grows around us. In the United States and throughout the world, a vast and growing movement to return to ancient traditions is arising, creating new forms of psychospiritual practice that can bring about the extension of empathy and the possibilities of knowledge beyond ourselves, the kind of knowledge of which Thich Nhat Hanh and his students write.

This is taking place in several ways. For instance:

* the revitalization of established religions, enabling them to be more relevant to the challenges of our time;

* the recognition that strong intuitive powers, sometimes crudely called psychic abilities, are, at root, not psychopathological as they have sometimes been regarded in the mental health professions, but, if used appropriately, shortened avenues to transformation, understanding, and love;

* the increasing commitment of millions of people to various forms of individual and group spiritual practice;

* the proliferation of large- and small-group experiential modalities that open consciousness and break down the barriers to connection and love;

* increasing recognition of the power of extraordinary experiences (such as spontaneous spiritual epiphanies, unanticipated traumas that lead to personal transformation, near-death experiences, and so-called extraterrestrial encounters) to shatter the boundaries of the ego, expand identity, and open us to empathy, love, and relationship;

* the emergence of new sociopolitical forms and institutions (such as the NGOs at the United Nations, and the emerging power of citizen diplomacy), which enable a wider range of professionals and ordinary citizens to take part in the processes and practices of international relations and relationships.

"A consciousness of interconnection makes possible the identification with other beings or objects, wherever they are located, and with the earth itself"

The United States is in a particularly strong position to take a leadership role in this transformation of consciousness. We are a pluralistic society with a long experience of living with diversity. The relative security that our privileged isolation has provided has given us the luxury of freedom, even though it has left us unprepared to deal with the terrible assault upon our nation that occurred in September, 2001. Yet this very safety and freedom has allowed us to become strong and creative in developing a practical understanding of the human psyche. We are jittery in the face of our new vulnerability, especially since we seem to receive alternating messages to beware of new attacks, but to go on living as if all were normal. But as we have been pioneers in creating a new political forma democracy that has inspired the world in its discovery of the power that resides in diversity, and a unity that can transcend differences we could also lead the world in developing the transformation of consciousness that could lead the human species away from the brink of disaster.

Conclusion

Humanity seems to be at a turning point. We are experiencing a kind of race to the future between the forces of destruction and creation. The preservation of our lives and possibilities will come not from the strategies of terrorists, nor from the bombs of the selfrighteous. This can happen only through a great awakening, a worldwide shift of consciousness that can transcend the habits of dualism, and enable the citizens of the Earth to become a genuine family of people and peoples, in which each of us can come to feel a responsibility for the welfare of all. As Gandhi once said, We must be the change. 

The original, longer version of this interview appeared in The Psychology of Terrorism, Vol. 1 (Praeger, 2002).

JOHN E. MACK, MD, (now deceased) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the founder of the Center for Psychology & Social Change.